The Front Row, 07/31/2006

Today, we talk with the former curator of the NPR Basic Record Library, Ted Libbey, about his new book -- eleven years in the making - The NPR Listener's Encyclopedia of Classical Music We also tour the Contemporary Arts Museum's 152nd Perspectives exhibition, Four Artists, Four Stories. . .

This month, KUHF Radio has been running an on-line raffle in which the grand prize is a Luxury Weekend for Two, including accommodations, meals and massages at the Houstonian Hotel, Club and Spa; tickets and limousine service to a Houston Symphony concert at Jones Hall, and two table-top High-Definition digital radios ... the prize package having an approximate retail value of two-thousand dollars.Î¾The Houstonian's Mark LuptonÎ¾joined KUHF's Dean DaltonÎ¾and pickedÎ¾Î¾Miriam EdelmanÎ¾as the lucky winner.Î¾Î¾Audio here.Î¾Î¾

Ted Libbey began his career right out of graduate school as a music critic, first for The Washington Star, and then, for four years, for The New York Times.Î¾ He was also a program annotator for various musical organizations, wrote the official history of Washington, D.C.'s National Symphony Orchestra, and served as editor of High Fidelity and Musical America magazines.Î¾ Nowadays, he reviews books for The Washington Post, and, since September, 2002, he has been the Director of Media Arts for the National Endowment for the Arts, making grants for arts-focused film, radio and television projects.Î¾ Ted Libbey is best known to public radio listeners, however, for his fourteen-year stint as the curator of the Performance Today Basic Record Library.Î¾ Each week, on the network's daily classical-music show, he would recommend a piece he felt that, because of its greatness or its significance, should be included in the record collection of every new and seasoned classical-music fan.Î¾ Although that series ended four years ago, Mister Libbey still has a relationship with National Public Radio, and, after eleven years of research and writing, he has published a new book, The NPRListener's Encyclopedia of Classical Music.Î¾ He spoke about it by phone from his home in Rockville, Maryland, with KUHF's Bob Stevenson.Î¾Audio here.Î¾Î¾

For over a quarter of a century, the Perspectives series of exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston has presented to the public the first major-museum showings of work by emerging artists.Î¾ The current Perspectives exhibition, Number 152, in fact features pieces in four different media by a quartet of young Houston-based visual artists, all of whom received their M-F-A degrees from the University of Houston.Î¾ Four Artists, Four Stories includes Michael Bise's drawings of domestic settings; Darryl Lauster's sculptural re-creations of historical decorative arts; JanakiÎ¾Lennie's painted city horizons; and Soody Sharifi's photographs of neighborhoods and communities, including some in her native Iran.Î¾ At "The CAM," KUHF's Alison Young spoke with the two women whose work is on display, beginning with Janaki Lennie.Î¾Audio here.Î¾